In certain video games, the humble Locked Door is among the most complex devices the Player Character is likely to encounter, requiring years of specialised training to comprehend its intricate workings. Faced with this diabolical machinery, a lesser man will turn and run in terror, their mission forever incomplete. But one of the NPCs with you has no such fears; their senses have been dulled to the terror before them. They step forward boldly. Maybe they deliver a sharp kick or shoulder barge. Maybe they pull out some lockpicks, a door-opening computerised contraption, or an explosive charge. Regardless, once they've worked their magic, the dastardly door lies forever defeated, the way forward clear.

You've just witnessed a Master of Unlocking at work.

Typically, the Master of Unlocking is a plot contrivance to explain why only certain doors can be opened, since only the master can correctly determine which doors are vulnerable to their awe-inspiring skills; that, or the developers are trying to make NPCs appear useful without having them actually do anything. It's also used to avoid Interchangeable Antimatter Keys. If a player character is Master of Unlocking in a game with more than one PC, it's probably to allow them into areas the others can't go. If they're the only character, their skill with certain doors is likely to just be covering up loading the next room; either that, or some doors will be harder or riskier to open than others, but have bigger rewards.

Related to Plot Coupon; one might be required before the Master of Unlocking can get to work, such as a set of picks or a passcard for their decoding device. Often related to Law of Conservation of Detail if the Master is an NPC; it means the pesky player won't try to open all those doors the developer didn't put anything behind. Utility Party Member is a more general variation of a Non-Player Companion who has several non-combat skills essential to advancing through the game.

Examples:

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Video Games

The Trope Namer is Resident Evil, which gives a set of lockpicks to the female PC (Jill) to explain why she can get into areas the male PC (Chris) can't without having to find keys. Jill also picks locks in Resident Evil 3.

Gets a Continuity Nod in the Resident Evil 5 DLC Lost in Nightmares opening cutscene (pictured), when Chris and Jill break into the Spencer Estate, Jill picks the lock on the front door while Chris covers her.

And referenced again in the 2016 HD Remaster of Resident Evil 0: after you defeat Dr. Marcus and use the two keys he drops to open the final locked door in the game, you get the achievement/trophy "Apprentice of Unlocking."

In the Famicom forerunner to Resident Evil, Sweet Home, one of the party members, Emi, came with a key, giving her the innate ability to unlock doors. Without her in your party, you would need to find a wire to be able to pick open locks.

Every single Call of Duty game has the player accompanied by NPCs with this awesome power.

In some cases the player himself has this power, though very selectively. For a humorous example that also displays Take Your Time, see shoot the hinges!

Splinter Cell featured a lockpicking mini-game. Prior to Conviction, you could either silently but slowly pick the lock, or quickly but loudly destroy it with a disposable pick (in the original and Pandora Tomorrow) or your knife (in Chaos Theory and Double Agent). Chaos Theory also introduced the ability to bash open unlocked doors, but they wouldn't actually be smashed into splinters. They would still function as doors.

Legendary has the player character a skilled thief who knows how to re-wire security panels (without even using his hands). This is the "covering up loading the next room" version.

In Killzone 2 this is Garza's special ability. Also, the player character, Sev, can plant frame charges, but only on certain doors.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman adds this to his existing list of skills after being given the warden's keycard, which he uses with his handy decoding contraption. In comics, a lockpicking kit is in one of the capsules/pouches on his utility belt.

Betrayal at Krondor has Jimmy the Hand, who was a sneak-thief of some renown before he joined the Prince's court. Gameplay-wise, he's the best picklock available unless you do a lot of grinding with other characters, and story-wise he gets hired in the town of Silden to steal a bag (of drugs in the novelization) from a locked house in exchange for information. There's also Abuk, an NPC found out on the main road somewhere who teaches the Lockpicking skill, whose only voiced line is literally, "I am Abuk, master of locks."

BioShock 2 has hacking in the same way, but instead of plumbing you master stopping the arrow in the right part of a meter.

In BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth can pick just about any lock as long as Booker has a sufficient number of lockpicks. It's explained as a skill she picked up during her failed attempts to escape her lifelong imprisonment in Monument Island.

Aliens Versus Predator 2 has the Marine equipped with two unlocking tools, a hacking device for computers and a blowtorch for locks. The Predator gets a "Charge Emitter" for hacking. The Alien just breaks things.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had lockpicking as a skill (you played a minigame which involved carefully pushing the lock's pins into place). There was no reason to actually invest in the lockpicking skill however, as the mini-game was very easy regardless of lockpicking skill. Especially after you acquire the unbreakable Skeleton Key, which made an easy minigame laughably easy: normally attempting to force a lock breaks the pick if you fail, but automatically opens the lock if you succeed. Because the Skeleton Key is unbreakable, anyone with it can simply spam the Force option until they open any lock except for ones scripted to be unpickable. The Champion of Cyrodiil essentially stops picking altogether and just rams the Skeleton Key around the lock for a bit until it pops open.

In Morrowind, you actually needed a certain level of lockpicking skill to beat a certain level of lock, so you couldn't expect to break the hardest lock with level 5 security, for example, unlike Oblivion.

Or you could just bypass the entire thing with an open spell, one of which you can get for free in Oblivion.

The minigame was revamped for Fallout 3, where it was simplified to twisting a bobby pin around a lock until you find the right spot to open it (amusingly, this occurs regardless of whether the door is a safe with a numeric keypad, a huge bulkhead with a handwheel, etc; apparently pin-tumbler locks are both widespread and invisible). Hacking is similar, but is based on a different skill (Science rather than Lockpicking) and you have to pick the right password out of a number of similar words.

The first two Fallout games had a lockpicking skill which would be checked against the difficulty of the door. It was also more realistic than the third in that, if you wanted to pick something electronic, you had to find an advanced set of picks later in the game (this could be circumvented, but only with very high levels of the skill).

Rei in Breath of Fire III can open some locked doors, but the number of times it's used to advance the plot is exactly once near the beginning of the game and the best item you can find behind one of the doors he can open is a fishing rod.

Also, Danc/Karn from the first game can unlock every door that's locked and disarm booby traps.

In Red Faction II, slinky stealth-expert Tangier is the only one capable of opening certain doors, despite the main character being a demolitions expert, and the game's gimmick being its utterly destroyable environments.

In Thief, it's one of the most crucial game mechanics besides stealthing. While it's pretty boring and simple in the first two games, the third installment made it surprisingly fresh and fun.

While the protagonist Garrett is the only one seen using lockpicks, the guards and civilian NPCs also often have keys and can lock or unlock doors as long as they're holding them.

This is stock-in-trade for all the Keepers; mastery of lockpicking is a crucial part of getting in and out of anywhere without a trace.

It's also not a guaranteed method of opening locks. Some locks can be quickly and easily picked, others take a good deal longer, and still other locks are advanced enough that Garrett cannot pick them, and needs to find the necessary key first.

Yahtzee's Trilby : The Art of Theft, a stealth Gaiden Game set in his Chzo Mythos universe, also features some pretty cool and relatively advanced-looking lockpicking... for a game made in the no-thrills AGS engine, that is...

The Hitman series and its Russian cousin Death To Spies also feature lockpicking several times during a mission. Generally this becomes less and less useful as the games go on, at least in Hitman, as later stages tend to use electronic locks and keycards.

In the Fire Emblem series, only thieves and assassins can use lockpicks to open doors and chests without keys. Later games would introduce the Rogue class, which one-ups them by being able to unlock doors and chests without lockpicks.

In Fire Emblem Awakening, level 1 Thieves have Pick/Locktouch as their starting class skill, letting them open chests/doors without any special items a la Rogue. The Ninjas and Outlaws from Fire Emblem Fates can do this as well. A Thief/Ninja/Outlaw that gets married can also pass Locktouch to their children if the player so desires. Or, if s/he passes the class to said kids (well, those who aren't already in it), they can reclass into it and adquire Locktouch on their own.

A nice use in Area 51 where at one point the player has to hold off the zombies while the Master of Locks opens the next area. The master can't die but if one gets past then he has to shoot it himself and it breaks his concentration.

In the original Castle Wolfenstein, if the player finds a locked chest, he has to "lockpick" it (wait for a timer to count down) before it will open. The player can shoot the chest to speed up the timer; unfortunately, this uses up bullets, and may attract nearby guards.

In Another World, your alien cellmate helps you escape the prison in level 2 by jimmying the doors open. You've got the tough job of protecting him from the laser-toting guards while he fiddles with the controls though, because if he dies you have no way out.

Locked doors can be a major nuisance in the Jagged Alliance series, which often entails having your mercs dig through the corpses to try to find the right key. Fortunately, they can be circumvented by having characters with good lockpicking skills, with lockbuster shotgun rounds, or with the old standby of plenty of 'splosives.

Rogues in the Dragon Age series of games are generally used for unlocking chests, and can increase their skill at doing so.

In Solatorobo, Red manages to pick a lock using a wire (yes, just a wire) when captured by Gren in Shetland.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has Mercer Frey, who is given to you as a companion for a certain Thieves' Guild quest and can open any door, including ancient Nordic doors that usually require both a puzzle to be solved and a specific variety of a unique type of key to open. As it turns out, he does it by using Nocturnal's Skeleton Key, which he stole, as you find out when he pulls a Face–Heel Turn on you - or rather, a Reveal. Sadly, in your possession it is merely an unbreakable lockpick, though it's implied that you simply lack the knowledge to use it to its full potential (Frey had the key to study at his leisure for a considerable amount of time).

Other than that, Vex is the best lockpick in Skyrim, being that she's the Master-level trainer for it.

In-game, lockpicking is done largely the same way in Fallout 3/New Vegas, with the exception being that you can pick any lock regardless of your actual skill level. On locks above your skill level, lockpicks will break faster.

From Chapter 2 of Tales of Monkey Island onward, Guybrush can use his Hook Hand as a lockpick to unlock doors and treasure chests. Of course, there are only a few items that can't be unlocked by his hook alone, and that is in the final chapter.

In Dragon Quest IV, Oojam, who joins your party in one chapter, can open locked doors that would normally require the Magic Key. As you can't get the key yet, this makes him a required party member in order to get to the boss.

In Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, we have the Assassin. She can unlock chests without a key. Some have complained that it's a pointless skill, since keys are so easy to come by in the game that you're usually selling the extras to make room in your inventory.

Despite being incredibly powerful, the main use of a Keyblade in Kingdom Hearts is the ability to open any lock (except for a couple of chests). The locks don't have to be physical, and can be on a person or a world.

Hades is able to exploit this by kidnapping Meg, putting her inside the lock that Zeus used to seal the Underdome, and waiting for Sora to rescue her.

Claptrap robots in Borderlands serve to allow access to blocked off areas. As of Borderlands 2, the company that makes Claptraps, Hyperion, is trying to take over the planet, and has every one of the things deactivated... except for one that got away. The last Claptrap proves an invaluable resource in the rebellion against Hyperion due to his ability to bypass Hyperion security measures — as he says, he was made to open doors. Of course, this being Borderlands, he's not very good at it.

Claptrap: I said "aaaaaaannndd open!", not "aaaaaaaaaand close a secondary set of doors!"

Half-Life 2: Alyx Vance has a door-unlocking device that can deactivate Combine forcefields.

PAYDAY 2 allows this with the Ghost class-a high level skill increases the speed of lockpicking, eventually allowing you to open safes by hand (instead of relying on a drill), and another skill at the same level allows you to open security doors (which require the drill or a keycard normally) with your handy ECM jammers. Regardless if the team wants to do stealth or not, the Ghost's major role is to open doors quickly.

There is a perk with the exact same name as this trope. Using the skill it gives you instantly opens boxes and chests, which is better than having to bash it with your weapon for several turns and damaging it, although fancier chests may require multiple uses of the skill to open. The Adventurer and Pirate classes start with the skill, no perk required.

In another sense of the trope, Queen Frieda has to power to automatically open sealed doors, which guard powerful Holy items and would normally require a rare and valuable Key of Seals to open.

IG-88 in LEGO Star Wars. Certain panels and doors in the games can only be unlocked by one type of character (either Astromech Droids, Protocol Droids, Bounty Hunters or Stormtroopers), IG-88 is unique in that he can unlock three of the four panel types (all except for Stormtrooper panels).

Tooru Amuro from Detective Conan is one of these, which is rather odd since Japanese law prohibits possession of any lockpicking tools and carries a penalty of one year imprisonment or a 500,000 yen fine.

Midnighter can apparently pick locks faster than Jack can kick down doors, although why a man who can literally command cities would even need to kick down a door is never explained.

Tolly in Castle Waiting is a Hammerling "doorman", which means that he has a near-supernatural ability to sense weaknesses in natural rock formations and constructed walls, and knock holes in them with minimal effort.

Fan Fiction

In Deserted Distractions, thanks to Yami Bakura's muscle memory, Ryou is able to pick locks and untie knots without fail.

In The Bridge, Key Ring's Cutie Mark is a key inside a padlock. He says his special talent is to unlock anything.

In Fallout: Equestria, Littlepip is very handy at picking locks. At first she starts with the typical pick set, but later on, her telekinesis is so well-developed that she can manipulate the pins themselves inside the lock.

John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day has a laptop password-cracking program. He mostly uses it to commit ATM fraud, but it ends up being helpful in unlocking the storage unit where the remains of the original Terminator are kept within Cyberdyne HQ. Extended in the comics where in one case he used the exact same program to crack Skynet itself with a line of codes finishing "Easy Money."

In the same movie, Sarah Connor doesn't do too badly with actual locks, using just a bent paper clip.

Meta example within the same film: Linda Hamilton learned how to pick locks for real for that scene (and did so, even while tied down). There was some struggling when it came to the British release because the censorship bureau feared that people would learn how to do it from seeing the movie.

Flynn in TRON has a talent with electronic locks among his various skills and uses it to open the huge main door at ENCOM.

Words of Radiance (second book of The Stormlight Archive): Shallan quickly discovers that her spren, Pattern, is great at picking locks. A lock is just another pattern, after all, and he is so very good with patterns. It helps that he can actually slip inside the lock and manipulate it from the inside.

Live Action TV

iCarly: Sam Puckett. Most often used to avert a typical sitcom Zany Scheme required to get past the door.

The Doctor's sonic screwdriver allows him to open or unlock basically anything, be it electronic or mechanical and whether it actually has anything that can be considered a lock or not.

Earlier incarnations had another weakness, namely a limit on how much force it could exert; it could shift the moving parts in an electronic or mechanical lock, but not a deadbolt or a bar across the door.

Parker of Leverage can unlock anything from safes to doors to handcuffs. Being a world-class thief, it pretty much comes with the job.

Castle's daughter Alexis in Castle proved to be a capable picklock in the episode "Target" when she used a hairpin to break out of the cell where her kidnapper left her. Though to be fair it did take her an hour.

In Supernatural, Dean has escaped from handcuffs no less than four times, using nearby items like paperclips and, one time, a car antenna.

Sam used a credit card to unlock a door when he didn't have a lockpick with him.

Sherlock Holmes in Elementary. Picking locks is one of his many hobbies, and he has quite a collection to practice on; this allows him to escape handcuffs fairly easily, among other things.

Sherlock's sobriety sponsor Alfredo is a former ace car thief, and today tests security systems for automobile companies. Lockpicking is the most basic of his skills, and he's very good at it. Both Sherlock and Alfredo have been teaching Watson to pick locks, as well.

Reese in Person of Interest. Ex-CIA, he always has a proper set of lockpicks on his person, and on the numerous occasions in which he has utilised them, close attention shows that he uses tension wrench and pick correctly, with a couple of possible exceptions that could be pinned on the demands of brevity. In addition to picks, he has also correctly tutored Harold in the use of bump keys, though Harold gets the hang of the technique impressively quickly.

Tabletop Games

In Dungeons & Dragons and other games based on it, this is the primary role of the Thief or Rogue, since bashing down doors or prying open chests is not always a wise option (bashing down doors makes noise that attracts monsters, and prying open chests can get you nailed by whatever trap the chest has protecting its contents).

This is of course the reason that only high HP characters are allowed to pry open chests.

This is also the reason why a ten-foot pole is a crucial piece of dungeoneering equipment.

In general, tabletop RPGsnot featuring some form or other of lockpicking skill are probably in the distinct minority due to the obvious if situational usefulness of being able to do a little breaking and entering without making noise or leaving an easily discovered trail of broken doors behind. At the same time, since only one such expert can work on a lock at a time and it's rare that multiples need to be picked simultaneously, there's little reason to have more than one or two of them in any group (with the main argument for a second already being "as backup just in case").

In Real Life, locks are not overly complicated devices and most, especially pin tumbler locks, can be picked with some effort. Disc tumbler locks, such as Abloy, are notoriously difficult to pick. Seasoned lockpickers belong in the top notch on prison pecking order, and are respected amongst other criminals.

Locksmiths.

When Richard Feynman was working on developing the atomic bomb, he made a hobby of cracking the safes and combination locks used to protect important documents. He mostly used various silly tricks to do it, and not technical locksmithing skills, and would sometimes leave snarky notes in supposedly secure places pointing out that they weren't.

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